I reserved one day of my Kyiv trip for the unpleasant task of travelling to our family summer house in the suburbs north of the city. By early May, this figure had risen to 2.2 million. According to Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko, mobile phone data indicated that throughout March the population of the Ukrainian capital dropped from a pre-war total of 3.5 million to around one million people. This snapshot appears to be representative of the bigger picture for Kyiv as a whole. During the peak of the fighting near Kyiv, only 10 of the 120 apartments in my residential building remained occupied. Meanwhile, the steady flow of returnees continues. The daily curfew has been relaxed and public transport is increasingly frequent. Restaurants cannot serve beer or wine after 4pm, but most are also now welcoming diners once again. Almost all the coffee shops along the Dnipro River embankment are now open for business. Throughout Kyiv, there are signs that the city is coming back to life. My visit caught the city somewhere between a full-scale war footing and recovery. They typically respond that there are now ten times more cars on the streets than back then and far fewer checkpoints or military patrols than a month ago. Whenever I share my impressions of wartime Kyiv with those who stayed in the city during the dark days of February and March, I sense a certain irritation as if I am exaggerating the current situation and underestimating the hardships they went through. Kyiv seems older and infinitely lonelier without them. There are no mothers pushing prams or noisy gangs of kids running around. The most jarring difference is the almost total absence of children. The beautiful riverside park close to my home is typically packed during sunny spring days, but all the people who used to annoy me with their scooters and bicycles and skateboards and dogs are now gone. Public spaces are also noticeably quieter.
SPRING DAYS OF MY LIFE FREE
After years of difficulties finding a free space, it is now possible to park virtually anywhere you like. In terms of traffic levels, Kyiv has probably returned to the Soviet days of the 1980s when only the privileged few could afford the luxury of a car. The Ukrainian capital is usually one of Europe’s most congested urban areas but now feels like a ghost town. It is clear that Kyiv underwent a “total militarization,” as one of my friends put it.Īnother striking feature of wartime Kyiv is the absence of cars. The main bridges spanning the majestic Dnipro River in the heart of the capital are still under heavy guard. Some of the bridges around Kyiv were blown up by the Ukrainian military to prevent Russian forces from approaching the city. It is obvious that those who remained in the city during the Russian advance were ready to defend every street and every single building against Putin’s troops.
Kyiv has become a fortress with many concrete checkpoints, anti-tank obstacles, and piles of sandbags still in place. This was not something we’d experienced during the past few months of internal exile in Lviv.Īll over the city, you sense the close proximity of war. The moment we got off the train, we were subjected to a rigorous document and luggage check by police armed with machine guns. Although more than a month had passed since Russia withdrew its troops from around the Ukrainian capital, there was an unfamiliar air of tension and little evidence of the carefree spring mood that we tend to take for granted at this time of year as Kyiv blossoms into life. The Kyiv I encountered on May 7 was radically different to the city I had left behind on February 24. The only problem is that you never know for sure whether your train will become a target. Ukraine’s trains continue to work perfectly well despite Russian attempts to disrupt weapons deliveries by targeting the country’s railway infrastructure. The overnight journey is comfortable and takes only seven hours. My travel companion and I therefore decided to take the train from Lviv to Kyiv. You typically have to wait in line for hours to get just 20 liters. Due to Russian airstrikes on Ukraine’s major oil refineries and storage facilities, petrol has become a precious commodity. Travelling in wartime Ukraine is no simple task, even in areas far from the front lines. More than two months after I hastily departed Kyiv with my family on the first day of the war, I returned to the Ukrainian capital for a few days from my temporary base in Lviv.
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